The Steelers are cleaning house. I see a move for Justin Fields on the horizon. And Champions League soccer is back as the Round of 16 matches get going today. But that’s pretty much it for sports. So on to…the links!
Working overtime
Printer goes brrrrrrrrrrrr. Seriously, fuck these guys. Also, can somebody tell me when Article I, Sec 7 of the Constitution died? Because it sure sounds like revenue will need to be raised for this monstrosity.
If at first you don’t succeed… This asshole should have been forced out more than a year ago. But I’m sure this will fail again. Not that the Senate will do the right thing anyway.
The Circus is coming to Atlanta! That hearing on Thursday is gonna be wild, I think. Or at least the aftermath will be.
Let ’em eat!
Tackling the serious problems. Wait, don’t a lot of those low-water washing machines require use of the pods? Oh well, fuck those people, right New York?
Freedom of religion! Oh wait, Crystal Methodist isn’t a real thing. Then he’s probably screwed.
If at first you don’t succeed (part 2)… These idiots won’t stop until they control every aspect of everybody’s lives.
Oh, this is just great. Especially since the NLRB will rubber stamp their demands and force airlines to raise rates, which will fuck everybody else over.
Are they still saying the motive is a mystery? Or are they ready to admit this person is fucking crazy? It’s way past time to open the asylums back up.
Have a listen to this smooth tune. Ah, that’s nice. So is this one. Enjoy them both.
And enjoy this lovely Fat Tuesday, dear friends.
I mean… yes? If you though people could rule themselves you’d never be a politician.
It would be nice if some journalo did some digging into connections between legislators and the owners of the two companies that made “recyclable” plastic bags that were still allowed.
I’d be willing to wager a bit of money that there were significant campaign contributions. I’m guessing that either a) the bag company owners are retiring or b) some other legislators found out about the grift and are now going to funnel that money to their own pockets by choosing a couple new companies that make bags.
It seems like it might still be Big Oil. They basically give regular grocery bags away for free, but if the demand is gone via legislation then they can “force” people to buy the “reusable” plastic bags.
Out of my bedroom and into my kitchen, and my bank, and my garage, and my laundry room, and my garden….
Feb 13, 2024 | I Am Lame – HAHA (before it gets edited )
On that, it looks like the block editor got a needed upgrade.
A number of updates remain to be made. I can these things now, as my status has been changed to LORD OF RACLETTE, NUKER OF RUSSIAN AND CHINESE BOTS.
We will still announce when the major upgrade will happen.
Maybe that wasn’t an accident. Maybe I felt like I was lame but now I don’t anymore since I added photos and music.
The comment space seems to be a little compressed, side-to-sidewise.
The Circus is coming to Atlanta! That hearing on Thursday is gonna be wild, I think. Or at least the aftermath will be.
Whatever happens we must SAVE democracy
Crystal Methodist
Swiss? SWISS???
And all their hymns are by these guys
Dammit, now I’ve got to find a reason to go drive on back roads so I can do 90 while listening to the entire Vegas album start to finish.
I don’t know whether to thank you or be mad at you.
I approve of this plan.
The best part of the BMW Drive For the Cure fundraiser was the dealership was near enough to some back roads that you could get someone else’s bimmers airborne.
Maybe some tracks from Tweekend too
https://youtu.be/A12-KN5UijA
I…I can’t, Patzer. I used to be a United Methodist…when I left to go be a Lutheran, I can’t weigh in on them anymore.
Tackling the serious problems. Wait, don’t a lot of those low-water washing machines require use of the pods? Oh well, fuck those people, right New York?
I thought people in New York didn’t have washing machines and went to those laundromat things…
Laundromat employees are people who have money to be extracted too.
Worldwide Flight Attendant Day of Action
Sounds interesting. Where do I sign up?
This is who will be giving you some action
At least he’s hot.
Gaëtan Dugas?
Serious question: Under the current (unfortunately unwritten) doctrine of the UMC, exactly what did he do that warranted dismissal?
One thing I’ve learned during this trip is that India bans the daily fail. Can’t say they’re wrong.
—“Californians want less plastic, not more.”—
Is this on of those stated preference vs revealed preference things?
The elected officials know the true intent of the people. They have divined it from the entrails of the ballot box.
Les plebs, c’est moi.
It also calls for a 25% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032
I already use grocery bags for other purposes, so success.
I used to give Mrs. Patzer a hard time for hoarding plastic grocery bags. Hundreds of them, accumulated over the years.
Now I have one more thing to apologize for.
Ha!
With our two crap factories, we “upcycle” every bag we can get our hands on.
My kids currently have our dog, so we’ve got a surplus.
When my MIL visited years ago she folded them into triangles for storage. It’s my emergency reserve since we occasionally use reusable bags.
I still have stock of 60 watt incandescent bulbs in my basement.
Easy-Bake Oven secure
He is going to be an Urban Chicken Farmer.
They can easily achieve that reduction by reversing their single use bag ‘ban’
If at first you don’t succeed (part 2)…
look failure is inevitable you have to keep trying. Didn’t some lefty say of the soviet union if your first souffle din not come out good, keep baking
You can’t make a soufflé without breaking more eggs than an omelet.
“plastic bag companies invented these thicker plastic bags that technically meet that definition of reusable but are clearly not being reused and don’t look like reusable bags and which just circumvent the law’s intent”
Best of intentions, what could possibly go wrong?
It reads to me like the people complaining about “tax loopholes”. You mean they followed the rules as written and got a result you didn’t like?
The state of California can’t allow scofflaws like these to both comply with the law and make the government look bad at the same time. Time to take them down a peg by forcing everybody to use filthy reusable grocery bags that carry germs.
Which they won’t be able to wash in their HE washers because the pods they need are banned!
/taps nose
I think the solution is government run washing facilities for clothes and dishes.
In fact, the solution is to give up all your clothes and food decision-making to top men. And since they can’t really accomplish that without controlling where you live, you’ll have to move into the pod and eat the fucking bugs, citizen!
“You’ll own nothing and like it.”
It’s for the best.*
*Not applicable to the political elite or their donors
Will that facility be, ah, gassing facility?
Gassing facility
If your social credit score is high enough you are issued clothing with colors, everyone else gets potato sacks to be washed once a week. To save the environment.
Fast fashion is a terrible industry though.
*Except for Glibs branded merchandise.
No, no, no, its BAD people following the rules. The “loopholes” are for good people, who righthink!
“don’t look like reusable bags and which just circumvent the law’s intent”
*cocks head quizzically*
When NJ outlawed plastic bags, I just went on Amazon and bought 3,000 plastic bags for a few bucks.
It’s time for the one way ratchet to click again. It’s the way it always works with regulation like this:
They implement it.
Companies comply.
The regulation accomplishes nothing.
They blame those companies for complying the wrong way.
They make the regulation more severe.
Companies comply.
The regulation accomp…well, you know the rest.
That’s what laws are written down for. To allow parsing.
These “reusable” bags are made from a material known as HDPE, which is thicker and heavier than the LDPE plastic bags of yore. And although both materials can be recycled — and in commercial and agricultural settings often are recycled — they are generally not in residential and consumer settings, Murray said.
Now, California legislators are hoping to correct that error by passing a law that closes that loophole and bans those thick plastic bags offered at the checkout line.
Close one “loophole,” manufacturers will find another way around it. The legislature will be playing Whack-A-Mole with consumers and groceries for decades.
Heh, I can see the grocers selling supercheap “totes” as part of the shopping experience.
And they will be blue, and they will be made by IKEA.
And ditching bags entirely like Walmart. Big retailers are happy to have bag bans. Hobble their competition and recover the cost or eliminate entirely what was once a complimentary service that consumers expected.
So yeah, the cops shot the kid. It’s easy for me to blame flinching/crap recoil control on them shooting low, but maybe she was similar height to a 7 year old.
The kid’s head could be close to the height of her center of mass.
She could have been holding him like a shield, we have no idea of the situation.
Not impossible, but using a rifle one-handed while holding 40lbs with the other would require an uncommon level of physicality.
Didn’t say she was holding him. Lord knows where that kid was standing. He could have run up to hug it, or be told to stand in front while it shot. Don’t assume that kid was unwilling.
I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense. Was she using her kid as a human shield? I mean, who takes her kid to a spree shooting? Double suicide by cop situation?
I guess we’ll just sit back and let investigators figure things out.
Worst Take Your Kid to Work day evah!
I laughed, but still – too soon!
I laughed as well,….but tuff for the kid.
(48 hr rule applies) Reports are she was having issues with her ex. If he was the kid’s father, murder/suicide could be possible.
The cops could have done better, but she’s the lunatic that brought a 💜 man shield to her own mass shooting.
That’s weird. My phone wished you all happy Valentine’s Day.
💋
Heartman shield? Poor Phil…
Evidently, the whole thing was Andy Dick’s fault. He gave Hartman’s wife coke after she’d been clean and rehabbed, and sent her back into drug/alcohol fueled rages.
And that was the reason that Jon Lovitz beat the crap out of Andy Dick.
“Liked by most, loved by some, hated by few” I used to be in the ‘hated by few’ camp until I read that he kicked Andy Dicks ass. Then jumped into the ‘loved by some’ crowd.
Note to self: Always spell out “less than three” if you really mean “less than three.”
I love that that emoji was apparently in your frequently used list
You see, Drake’s love is unlike that of a square.
whaddup doh’
What the hell’s going on down there?
Dead cow with attached towing notice removed from I-675
For some reason thats all over the news. It was reported that the owners are looking to their vet or someone with a crane/lift contraption before they can moooo-ve .
Let me call a couple of my hillbilly friends. A truck or two, some tow-straps, and a come-along and we’ll have it gone in a few hours.
48 hour rule.
““With this bill, the Senate declares that American leadership will not waiver, will not falter, will not fail,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who worked closely with Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on the legislation.”
Seems he’s confusing leading the world with being led around by the world and acting as their private purse. Fuck the Senate.
My eye is still twitching at the misuse of the word “waiver.”
My mind now automatically edits the trash produced by journalists.
They’ll stop at nothing to keep the money printer and cash laundering operation going. Completely irrelevant to them how many Ukrainians are slaughtered,or how much their own voters hate them.
If I am understanding the MSM correctly, this means you are a Putin-lover – right?
Yes! I don’t want money borrowed against my grandkids’ future earnings to be laundered through a corrupt country for a lost war – because Vlad is so dreamy.
“…we shall pay any price, beah any burden…”
This happy horseshit should not have survived Dallas, November 1963 but it’s still with us.
This clip speaks to me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxKD6RFxRdA
I will not worship at the feet of Moloch, and I will tear down the temple of Dagon if I must.
And then the Dagons came.
In your mouth?
Uffda. Sorry, that seemed funnier in my head. Now that I see it, it seems dickish. Apologies Zwak.
‘sallright.
*I* thought it was funny.
Daily Ray of Sunshine
No mention of a “non-nutritive cereal varnish.”
You pay extra for that.
Mentions of fascism in Pravda, by year
https://twitter.com/VenturCommunist/status/1756794732406055342
“She refuted claims from Alaska Airlines that the economic proposals from the union aren’t feasible. She said Alaska Airlines and others have come out of the Covid-19 pandemic with record profits and Alaska Airlines gave pilots pay raises outside of contract negotiations and recently reached a deal to acquire Hawaiian Airlines.”
God forbid the article include any information on the bargaining positions of either side, current pay rates or anything of consequence.
Maybe pilots have a slightly elevated skill set? Hm, maybe a shortage of pilots compared with glorified wait staff.
“Refuted”
Another word that has lost its meaning.
Waitress in the Sky – Replacements
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdreSchCog8
I miss Tundra
#MeToo
Do you know how hard it is to be a flight attendant?!!!
That is a sooper skilled job.
Dealing with people that are often anxious, testy, or moderately drunk?
Not part of my skill set.
I would agree that it’s not an easy job and I wouldn’t want to do it myself, but that doesn’t mean there is any shortage of labor causing them to increase wages.
I didn’t say that I’d want that job either. But with the exception of anxious, waitresses and waiters deal with the same sorts of people.
I have learned that I hate any job involving sales or in food service. More power to people that can do them.
A good friend of mine was a stewardess for Continental for a few years.
Even then (20 years ago?) it was widely understood that airlines pay shit, and you take the job for the free travel perks.
A previous supervisor’s wife was a stewardess for a while. She did it for the travel perks, she went into assisted living nursing when they decided that they needed her to stay around the house to help watch the kids.
The group as a whole suffered a serious loss off goodwill when they tried to change their public persona from “waitresses in a bad restaurant six miles up” to “essential part of your flight safety, just as important as the Captain and First Officer” which included being the Mask Police.
People use whatever means are available to increase their income.
Film at Eleven.
I forgot what day it is…..
TALL MARDI GRAS CANS!
Packzi day you heathen.
The cafeteria decided that today would be when they celebrate Lunar New Year.
Oh yeah. When I was dating OG-2X-OG, aka “The Big, Huge, Giant, Polack” it was those things all over my kitchen.
Tomorrow marks the start of fast food fish sandwich season.
It’s also fish fry season.
Damn you.
I could fuck up a McD’s 2X filet w/extra tartar sauce right about now.
Iran & Saudi Arabia: The Rivalry that Split the Islamic World
1979 was the year that changed everything in the Middle East, setting it on the path to today. In Iran, the Islamic Revolution established the nation as a theocracy that sought to defend Shi’ism across the world.
In Saudi Arabia, the siege of the Holy Mosque led to the nation embracing a more radical Sunni Islam that it began to export around the world.
At the same time, General Zia came to power in Pakistan and the number of Saudi-funded mosques and madrasas began to grow, as did clashes between Sunnis and Shias in the country.
while the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US poured money into arming the Afghan Mujahideen
https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill/status/1757252283039887366
Madrasa just means school in Arabic. It can refer to both regular schools and Islamic ones, though the difference is clear based on the age of the students. I remember so many people getting the vapors because Obama attended a madrasa in Indonesia.
Daras means to study in Arabic. Mudarris means teacher.
Whatever, who cares? Derka derka Muhammad jihad!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIlG9aSMCpg
I’mma need you to ‘splain something.
I have been told that when wypipo study Arabic, they are studying MSA, which nobody actually speaks.
If this is true, then when someone says word X means Y in “Arabic” do they mean MSA, or a version that is actually someone’s native language, or do they all have the same vocabulary but different syntax or something?
Also, why do people “well akshually” with the usage of a (formerly/originally) Arabic word in the context of that word being used in English? I shouldn’t have to say it, but English not only has denotative definitions but connotative definitions which are completely real and have fuck-all to do with the word’s etymology.
My Arabic teachers at DLI joked that MSA stands for “Monterey Standard Arabic.”
MSA, modern standard Arabic, is rarely spoken in daily life, though it is widely taught and understood. It is based on the old-fashioned Arabic in Koran and is used in speeches, news broadcasts, and other official venues. Newspapers and other official publications throughout the Arabic speaking world are written in MSA. In this way, MSA is like the way written Chinese is the common language among those who speak different “dialects” of Chinese.
The standard (MSA) Arabic word for “tomorrow” is ghadan. In Levantine Arabic, it is bukra and in Iraqi Arabic, it is bacher. So we see that with simple, common words, there is a lot of variation. In general, there is little variation in grammar.
Bottom line: you must learn MSA to read and study and dialect to understand everyday speech.
As for the madrasa thing, I think it’s important to note its common and innocuous meaning. All the more so after I have seen so many pant-shitting articles about Saudi-funded schools (madrasas).
Levantine Arabic, – Nassim Taleb should scream at you that Levantine is a different if similar language not a dialect of Arabic
I spent 2,000 hours studying Levantine Arabic. It is not substantially different than Sudanese, Yemeni, Iraqi, or Egyptian Arabic. I passed the listening comprehension tests for all those dialects and a few others with minimal study.
there is a guy on the yutubz doing stuff like randomly talking to non native english speakers in their language who knows a lot of them, started with chinese dialect but branched off. This has, off course, nothing to do with anything.
On a related note, almost everyone in Kenya and Tanzania is bilingual in Swahili and their tribal language, which like Swahili, is usually a Bantu one. Educated people in those countries are often trilingual, knowing English in addition to the other two.
In the Congo region, many people know Swahili and French. It’s all a matter of practice. I read that professional UN translators are usually fluent (able to do simultaneous translation) in 4 languages. Some Canadian courtroom interpreter has the all-time, verified hyperpolyglot record.
***
Powell Alexander Janulus (born 1939) is a Canadian polyglot who lives in White Rock, British Columbia, and entered the Guinness World Records in 1985 for fluency in 42 languages.[1] To qualify, he had to pass a two-hour conversational fluency test with a native speaker of each of the 42 languages he spoke at that time.
***
For reference, Richard Burton, the famous translator of the Arabian Nights, was fluent supposedly in 24 languages and dialects. He also failed the British Army Arabic test after successfully visiting Mecca while disguised as a Muslim from Afghanistan. Go figure.
I’d like to know more about his failure. Did he akshually on a question that was wrong? Or the whole test?
***
Burton sat for the examination as an Arab linguist. The examiner was Robert Lambert Playfair, who mistrusted Burton. As Professor George Percy Badger knew Arabic well, Playfair asked Badger to oversee the exam. Having been told that Burton could be vindictive, and wishing to avoid any animosity should Burton fail, Badger declined. Playfair conducted the tests; despite Burton’s success living like an Arab, Playfair had recommended to the committee that Burton be failed. Badger later told Burton that “After looking [Burton’s test] over, I [had] sent them back to [Playfair] with a note eulogising your attainments and … remarking on the absurdity of the Bombay Committee being made to judge your proficiency inasmuch as I did not believe that any of them possessed a tithe of the knowledge of Arabic you did.”[25]
***
Madrasa just means school in Arabic – yes but I assume Wahhabi Saudi-funded ones were mostly Islamic.
There is an emphasis on Islam, but it is not the only subject. Think of it as being like a Catholic school.
Didn’t mean to come across as dickish, but there is an annoying phenomenon where things like “globalize the intifada” which has a definite meaning of “fuck up Jews wherever they are” when chanted by Ivy League students, gets defended by someone saying “that’s not what intifada means — you don’t even speak Arabic!!!” And then they spend 350 words telling you it just means to get international consensus to put totally peaceful sanctions on the Netanyahu government.
Very true. For the record, intifada means uprising and has the exact same violent connotations as English.
A few months ago, I was visiting my parents who recently stopped watching Fox News for being too soft and switched to NewsMax. Well, as I was watching, the news bimbo kept saying infitada instead of intifada. It irked me.
How much attention would you pay to someone who gave a report about a gun they kept calling an R-15?
“In frittata” is an excellent way of enjoying spinach.
Infitada, hakuna matata, whole enchilada.
Hakuna matata means no worries for the rest of your life.
Hakuna mavodka means no memories for the rest of your night.
Deus volt! *throws grenade
He’s not wrong folks.
Inflation, border wide open, homelessness, crime through the roof, world in general going to shit…fuck it, let’s send north of 95 billion overseas so the defense industry can be swamped with largesse. What a bad joke and a bad misreading of the room.
what about the send good bourbon to Romania program? Any funding for that?
You’ll get white bottle Evan Williams which tastes like corn mash and ass and you’ll like it.
The range of products under a single name can be amazing.
Evan Williams single barrel is a great bourbon. Best bang for buck, IMO.
I’m slowly coming around to the idea that “Bottled in Bond” stuff is actually better than the regular stuff.
Several years back (2021), a local distillery (Cleveland Whiskey) were looking to raise some money for an expansion. So they did a bond offering, which was secured by rye or bourbon that was aging in barrels for the duration of the bond (6 years). It had a fixed interest rate of 5% per year, or the option when redeeming it to get your investment back in the spirit that had been aging (with a special bottling and label). When I first bought into the bond, I figured I’d swap over a couple of bottles for gifts and the like. With the interest rate spike, I’m now leaning towards converting it all into bottles.
When your bourbon consumption goes from the “mix this with Coke to get blasted with friends at a weekend party” to “sip this neat by the fireplace with an old friend,” you should consider Bottled in Bond as a floor for your whiskey.
EW BiB is pretty good.
Maybe I was thinking Jim Beam.
Infamous peanut flavor?
Most of Evan Williams bourbons have no business being so cheap. Such a good brand overall. Not the flavored shit though.
“With the wages that we have, it’s just unsustainable. We can’t live off of these wages,” said Doris Millard, a flight attendant at Air Wisconsin for 44 years who said her pay has changed little since she started at the airline in 1980. “I feel like I’m being forced to give up my career and find something else or continue to basically live in poverty.”
Stewardesses used to be grounded when they got married or at age 32. Maybe go back to that and you won’t have sky waitresses complaining that they’re hitting Social Security age in penury.
44 years at a feeder airline. And complaining about the pay.
I remember when flightgals sharing an apartment was a sit-com staple because it reflected reality. People sure have gained inflated sense of their own worth over the last few decades.
My paper applies machine learning to 1970s-80s satellite imagery to revisit one of the 🇨🇳 Chinese Miracle’s first major reforms, the Household Responsibility System—the end of collective socialist agriculture. Starting in Anhui Province in 1978, the Household Responsibility System (often incorrectly attributed to Deng Xiaoping) broke up Mao’s collective farms and brought back household farming—loosely, the end of communism in rural China.
The common view is that it boosted yields. But Chinese statistics, particularly from the pre-reform era, are notoriously unreliable. Few output statistics are available at the sub-provincial level, making precise causal identification difficult, limiting prior research.
Enter historical satellites. We use these satellite features to train a random forest to predict rice + wheat yields in nearby Asian countries.
We show that our satellite-based models can accurately predict yields—and, notably, can precisely pick up the effects of weather shocks in China. we look at the HRS’s provincial rollout. Our satellites can peer right at the border between provinces that reform earlier and later, and control for fixed characteristics of these places.
We see no effect on grain yields.
There are ways of reconciling our findings w the literature. Our satellite model still finds that *aggregate* yields rose in the 1980s.
A price liberalization, in 1979, may have been the cause.
It’s also possible labor productivity rose—but we can’t see labor from space.
https://twitter.com/oliverwkim/status/1729160444500410733
They were growing rice in forests?
I wonder how good resolution and coverage 1970s-80s satellite imagery had…
Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) to
measure agricultural yields. AVHRR, which was carried by National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) satellites, collected imagery at red and near-infrared bands at a 4km
resolution, twice daily, from late 1978 to 2013. We aggregate our satellite data up both over space
and time. To make computation feasible, we bin observations into a grid of 0.05-degree cells,
which are roughly 5km squares around the latitude of Anhui Province (31 degrees N). This gives
us a total of 345,608 grid cells in China, and 3,870,470 observations from 1978 to 1990.
The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index Measuring agricultural yields with satellites re-
lies on a simple biological observation: plants use light from the visible part of the electromag-
netic spectrum to photosynthesize, while reflecting back higher-frequency light (Taiz et al. 2022).
Viewed from space, a healthy plant will thus reflect more near-infrared (NIR) light relative to red
or green light than a stressed plant. This insight motivates one of the most common measures of
crop cover in environmental science, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index
Random Forests We can now turn to a more flexible machine learning models of yield pre-
diction, random forest regression, which has been deployed successfully in a large number of
studies to predict agricultural yields using remotely sensed data.6
Random forests work by combining the predictions of a large number, or forest, of regression
trees. These individual regression trees predict an outcome by progressively splitting the data
into smaller subsamples according to the values of their covariates (or “features”), then assigning
the outcome mean for that subsample. For instance, if the outcome is “rice yield” and a feature
is “average temperature during the growing season”, a simple one-split tree (given the dangers
of high heat) might split at “> 30◦C”. When predicting, the model assigns yields exceeding
> 30◦C the average from training data above this split. More sophisticated trees could split on
further covariates, for instance “rainfall > historical mean”. Each individual tree is estimated on
a different bootstrapped sample of the original data, using only a random subset of the available
features to determine each split, which is chosen to minimize prediction error. The predictions
of these trees are then averaged to form the random forest’s overall prediction.
Fancy stuff
That’s laughably bad resolution for the imagery. I work with a lot of historical Aerials. Modern stuff is sooo much better.
I suspect you already know this
No, flowers in the desert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=657TZDHZqj4
How is the water situation in California?
No, the real Flower in the Desert.
So Jelly! Admit it!
You guys know you all look at Minnesoda’s Rap Legislator and are green with envy.
She need to work on her raps
Her real videos are pretty bad too
Good Lord.
That broad is immediately annoying.
Jesus fucking Christ…
Perhaps she’s channeling the spirit of Oswald Bates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7dPprbzNSc
“Hip-hop, debate, politics, it’s all part of the same culture,” Pérez-Vega said.
Sure, Jan.
Behold the glory of hip-hop debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmO-ziHU_D8
I should add that regular tournament-style debate is stupid too.
Been nice knowing our Houston Glibs. Too bad you will die this weekend
Is it physically possible for a tornado to destroy Houston? I find that doubtful.
Houston sized tornados ain’t possible.
What a maroon. The rest of his predictions are even loonier.
Well, he just went and done did it.
So much for the space-time continuum. Hope he’s happy.
My question is who finds these things entertaining that this guy has an audience? Except Pope Jimbo obviously
Look just because your are immortal (excepting for sunshine and pain in the neck professors of carpentry), don’t discount the desire by the rest of us to avoid death if possible.
Once I had blood drawn for some routine labs. They took it from my neck.
Do not see Dr. Acula.
Obligatory.
Is this the movie with Bruce Willis?
Is that John Titor again? Or another one?
Was Titor the time cube guy or am I confusing two things from usenet era?
Probably? Im not sure.
This was one of his predictions…he was just off by 20 or so years
The most immediate of Titor’s predictions foretold a civil war in the United States having to do with “order and rights”. The war as Titor described it would begin in 2005[7] with civil unrest surrounding the presidential election of the previous year. According to Titor, this civil conflict, which he described as “having a Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse”,[7] would be “pretty much at everyone’s doorstep” and erupt into war by 2008. As a result, the United States would split into five regions based on a variety of factors, including differing military objectives.
The Story Behind Biden’s Trade Failure
Emails show how Lina Khan and the left co-opted Katherine Tai.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-trade-policy-katherine-tai-ipef-ustr-lina-khan-open-markets-rethink-trade-847ec41b?st=8jyr4fvdu72978s&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Workers aren’t consumers. It is known.
How about doing nothing and seeing how things evolve? No? Can’t keep the government’s dick out of those mashed potatoes?
The still dont know its not that kind of a party.
I played https://squaredle.com/xp 02/13:
*22/22 words (+1 bonus word)
⏱️ In the top 23% by speed
I played https://squaredle.com 02/13:
*35/35 words (+9 bonus words)
⏱️ In the top 17% by speed
🔥 Solve streak: 142
And I got to use snow mode this morning! 🙂
Austin has this weird dynamic where they will do the latest CA idiocy, the “loopholes” will manifest, then they’ll revert to the old status quo. Tried banning Uber /Lyft, tried banning thin plastic bags, then repealed both.
Part of the dynamic is the “blue dot” effect, where the city is surrounded by suburbs and countryside not going along with the idiocy, so people can see the before and after side by side.
The blueberry in the tomato soup.
Austin, in addition to being the seat of state government, is a university town. There’s some law somewhere, perhaps in the Constitution, that requires towns with state universities to be overwhelmingly “progressive.” If you look at the red/blue county maps of the last few elections, you can spot all the universities in the “flyover states” because they’re dots of blue in a sea of red.
Leftists like to claim that’s because the more educated (well, credentialed anyway) you are the more likely you are to be leftist. That’s not the reason. It’s because universities are very insular environments, dependent on the state for existence, and overrun by clueless adolescents. They’ve become echo chambers of whatever flavor of quasi-Marxism is currently in fashion. To be fair, military base towns used to be echo chambers of conservatism for nearly identical reasons.
Also, students only spend a short amount of time in college towns, so they don’t have to live with the consequences of their actions.
Sometimes the reversion doesn’t work though. I’m thinking specifically of the food truck ban, which resulted in killing off the good ones, now the ones seem to be crappy expansions from brick-and-mortar restaurants.
Again with the food trucks.
When will Sloopy cover real sports like Waxball?
“Still, the vote was a win for both Senate leaders. Schumer noted the strong bipartisan support and projected that if the House speaker brings it forward it would have the same strong support in that chamber. McConnell has made Ukraine his top priority in recent months, and was resolute in the face of considerable pushback from his own GOP conference.”
If it was up to me, I would seize the Senator’s ill-gotten wealth, send their closet military aged relative to the front lines of Ukraine or Israel, and then force them to live in poverty for the rest of their lives. The idea that they can spend this sort of money and know that we don’t have it and will send us down a financial spiral is mind blowing.
I’d live in the closet too if my relative was a US Senator.
Damn
*Closest
I figured you were trying to diversify the military.
Ya, but would you want to come out of the closet, Jimbo?
send their closet military aged relative to the front lines
Familial guilt FTW.
Just send turtle and his friends themselves. They can make coffee, do paperwork, bandage wounds. Don’t need to be military age.
I like this version better.
They can pull triggers and stop bullets as well as young men. Just give them some all-terrain rasals.
Young men have always been sent to fight the Old Men’s wars.
The Fires of America’s Cultural Revolution Were Already Burning
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/the-fires-of-americas-cultural-revolution-were-already-burning/
Yet this leads me to my problems with Rufo’s diagnosis. He still falls into the trap that so many American conservatives do in arguing that leftism is driven by a form of Marxism imported from outside America’s shores. In this view, leftism is an alien ideology parasitic on America’s political and cultural tradition rather than a dire consequence of the liberalism inherent within the American political system itself. It is the fetishization of equality that may have contributed to the quandary in which Americans and other Westerners now find themselves.
Thus, Rufo makes the same arguments against “cultural Marxism” and the malign influence of the German Frankfurt School others have made, even if he is careful not to paint with as broad a brush as Mark Levin does in American Marxism (2021).
America faces not an importation of Marxism into an otherwise pristine political and cultural ecology but a political environment of continued revolution expanding on the one that occurred in 1776. Unfortunately, Rufo does not engage with James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution in depth, which explains the growth of the American elite administrative class in the early-to-mid-20th century and carries more explanatory power than blaming some German immigrants from Frankfurt.
Rather than cultural Marxism, the managerial elite adopted postwar consensus liberalism, which evolved into neoliberalism and neoconservatism during the 1970s and 8os. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the digital revolution, this class adopted “wokeness.” Burnham and other theorists of the elite political class understood that ruling classes are not driven by ideology but adopt whatever values could be made to legitimize their rule. They also operate within the already established moral and cultural parameters of the societies they come to dominate.
Is something a legacy sexist would say.
If it was truly worldwide, it would be Cabin Attendant Day of Action.
Cabin Boy day of action, thank you.
RIP Bob Edwards. His voice brings back childhood memories of hanging with my dad while he had the radio on in the mornings.
Two journalists left in the west. Tucker, who just interviewed Putin, and Patrick Lancaster.
Here is an interview he did with captured Ukrainians who have joined the Russian Army. I found their individual stories interesting. While I believe their reasons for switching sides, it also sounds like their homes are in areas that have joined the Russian Federation.
The Ukes blowing up their POW barracks didn’t endear them to the Ukraine either.
https://youtu.be/bGBc6Pza3G8?feature=shared
Polyamory and open relationships are a big topic these days.
How does partner count impact fertility rate?
The data over a century show those who’ve had more partners have far fewer kids!
https://twitter.com/MoreBirths/status/1756769508595794194
the graph is of men with various number of partners… I would think it is possible that do not know how many kids they have…
I mean that’s not surprising at all.
“Californians want less plastic, not more.”
We can tell because all the shoppers refuse to use those bags.
The relationship between individual Armed Forces Qualification Test percentile scores and job-specific performance measures in the military.
https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1757264942804181460
I had no idea “assaultman” was a thing.
Marines with Infantry Training Battalion, School of Infantry East go through the 0351 Infantry Assaultman Course on Camp Geiger at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, N.C., April to May 2018. The course is nine weeks long focusing on rocket fire in support of rifle squads, platoons and other companies within the infantry battalion. This was one of the last classes to run through the course due to the military occupational specialty being phased out by March 2020.
Probably old data
For sure. It’s assaultperson now.
Did you just assume the species of our brave furries in uniform?
It is assault kitty to you!
Every epic quest:
https://twitter.com/MisterABK/status/1757365350948028870
Release the Cockneys!
Most Border Collies are smart.
https://twitter.com/PierPets/status/1757063553473822805
just doesn’t test good is all
The difference between dogs and cats
Crikey!
Allen and Engstrom said states such as New Jersey and New York followed California’s move toward banning plastic bags but learned from California’s mistake and crafted legislation to close the loophole.
“There’s this virtuous cycle of dialogue between those states that want to do the right thing where we we build on each other’s work and almost challenge each other” to write effective, all-encompassing laws, Allen said.
Race to the bottom, in other words.
What I enjoy is these California bag bans came on roughly the same time as self checkout.
When in California, I just say 0 bags. Problem solved.
The absolute worst thing about washing my clothes at a laundromat is when my “clean” clothes reek of some godawful perfume from the previous user’s laundry detergent. Ban perfume.
What’s wrong with an overpowering flower smell that somehow also smells like chemicals? I don’t know how people manage to use that stuff without breaking out in a rash.
I wash clothes in ammonia sometimes. Removes any smells. Quite effective for perfume and smoky bar smells.
Ill keep that in mind. Jugsy has this body wash that she insists smells like vanilla.
To me its more akin to carburetor cleaner.
Maybe a 70s/80s thing – I want my clean clothes to have a powerful perfumey smell. To me they are not clean otherwise.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mountain fresh rhywun as he is known at the ‘mat.
I want my clean clothes not to smell at all, so I’m not convinced it’s an age thing. 😉
The absolute worst thing about washing my clothes at a laundromat is that i am using a fucking laundromat!
Pondering thoughts:
If President Biden is on TikTok now and he and his staffers are using government issued phones, how do they post to TikTok if government issued phones are banned from downloading the app?
Granted, it is his campaign and not his ‘official’ capacity. Pondering thought completed.
I asked the same yesterday.
(the answer seemed to be “the campaign is separate from the WH staff”. I LOLed)
The people who would work at the White House are the type to carry two cell phones.
Nerds.
Yep, no overlap there whatsoever, none.
Latest environmental catastrophe: The earth is getting greener
So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot.
Sometimes context matters.
Christmas list
After 20 years of prioritizing this kind of combat, and with the US turning its focus to rivals like China, the Air Force looks to need more than just a facelift.
“As we come out of counterinsurgency warfare and look to pivot towards peer competition or peer conflict with a very different adversary,” Moore said, “we have not 4,000 fighters, but 2,000. They average not eight years old, but 28 years old. Our pilots are flying not 18 to 20 hours a month but six to eight hours a month. And we’re ready not for great-power competition, but for counterinsurgency warfare.”
Pointing to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s remarks in September that the Air Force “must be ready for a kind of war we have no modern experience with,” the general said that it’s “absolutely true” that the US is facing the possibility of “a war that we’ve not ever seen the likes of before.”
Our boys will be dogfighting the Rooskies over Prague. Get the checkbooks out.
What a fucking joke. If it comes down to it, that war will be fought with long range missiles, not shiny flyboy toys.
It was 4 years ago today I lost my Wife,
Time flies, damn!
*pours one out* Thoughts with you buddy.
Tensions have led both US and Chinese air forces to intensify pilot training for aerial combat. The focus on improved training comes from a realization that a fight with a near-peer or peer adversary has the potential to be far more complex and dangerous than anything seen in the Middle East.
Senior Air Force leaders have said that the US must be prepared for possible fights in contested environments with WWII-level combat attrition rates.
At a conference in September, Air Combat Command’s Gen. Mark Kelly said that the Air Force needs to offer airmen and other personnel “all the highest-end training and the reps and sets we can get them because we also know from high-end exercises and also other studies that not all of our airmen will come back from a peer fight.”
Fap fap fap.
WWII-level attrition rates – at least it will be a very short war.
“Cartel prints Travis Kelce’s name on bags of fentanyl with grainy image of football player in bizarre bid to appeal to youngsters over Super Bowl weekend”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13078345/cartel-travis-kelce-fentanyl-bags.html
Bags of heroin have always had tags.
WWII combat attrition rates, you say?
Lockheed can easily churn out 8 or 10 F-22s a week to keep up.
“Palestinian owner of Somalian mall in Minneapolis bans the city’s Jewish mayor Jacob Frey from the shopping complex for vetoing ceasefire resolution: ‘I thought you were just a Jew but it appears you lean towards the other extreme'”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13078395/palestinian-mall-owner-bans-minneapolis-mayor.html
A Minneapolis ceasefire resolution?
The absolute worst thing about washing my clothes at a laundromat is that i am using a fucking laundromat!
That’s the second worst thing. I miss my garage sale washing machine.
We have reusable plastic bags coming out our ears. It seems like my wife has about 10 of them in her car. There’s about 6 in my car. Another dozen in the garage. At least I was able to use the “single use” bags as garbage bags. The reusable bags feel too pricey to use as such.
We have a bunch. We use them in small wastebaskets and for used kitty litter. We never run out, but we never deplete our stock, either.
The only problem with using the “single use” bags for litter scooping is making sure they don’t have holes. The clumping litter is liable to leak through even tiny holes, and the quality of the bags seems to have gone downhill.
We have a couple boxes of them in the basement. Wife doesn’t know what to do with them.
I end up putting them in the recycling tip.
Our recycling people tell us not to put those in the recycling. They gum up the teeth of the shredder.
“Authorities have identified the shooter as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, a 36-year-old transgender immigrant from El Salvador, according to multiple independent sources speaking to KHOU 11 Jeremy Rogalski.
Moreno, who has a criminal history stretching back to 2005, was previously known as Jeffery Escalante, based on records from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
His past arrests paint a troubling picture, encompassing a range of offenses including failure to stop and give information, assault of a public servant, assault causing bodily injury, forgery, possession of marijuana, theft, evading arrest, and unlawful carrying of a weapon.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/02/breaking-lakewood-church-shooter-identified-as-transgender-immigrant/
Doomderp is an inexhaustible resource
Of the 1,189 creatures listed by the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, or CMS, more than one in five are threatened.
They include species from all sorts of animal groups — whales, sharks, elephants, wild cats, raptors, birds and insects, among others.
Some 44% of those species listed are undergoing population declines, the report said. Most alarming is the state of the world’s migratory fish: Nearly all, 97%, of those listed are threatened with extinction.
The report is the first inventory to assess the status of migratory species and how they are trying to survive in a world dramatically changed by humans. It found the two biggest threats were overexploitation and loss of habitat because of human activity, such as clearing land for farming, roads and infrastructure. Those activities also fragment migratory species’ pathways, sometimes making it impossible for them to complete their journeys.
Around 58% of the monitored locations recognized as important for migratory species are facing what the CMS says are unsustainable levels of pressure from humans.
Climate change and pollution are also major threats. Warmer temperatures not only force some species to travel farther, but can also lead animals to move at different times of year. That can mean missing out on prey or a mate for breeding.
Ban humans.